Two flamingo dads have successfully hatched a healthy chick at California’s San Diego Zoo Safari Park.
The hatchling, born in late September, is now “thriving,” according to an Instagram post from the world-renowned zoo — no word yet on a gender reveal.
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The blushing pink, 40-something-year-old fathers proved their parenting skills earlier this year when zoo handlers gave them a dummy egg. Zoos sometimes use dummy eggs, a replica of a real bird egg, to control birds’ breeding behaviors.
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Wildlife care specialists then “sneakily swapped a fertile egg into their nest, allowing another pair of flamingos to double-clutch and raise a second hatchling,” the zoo wrote in an Instagram post.
Video of the two doting dads revealed their fuzzy grey chick on its mud mound nest getting groomed and learning to stand upright — still on two legs, for now. In the video, visitors to the popular animal park can be heard be “oooh-ing” and “ahhh-ing” behind the bird family.
The zoo says the pair of bird dads has “perfected their fatherly duties by alternating brooding responsibilities and keeping the chick satisfied thanks to a hearty helping of crop milk every day.” Crop milk is a mineral-rich, high-fat-and-protein secretion produced by both male and female birds in their upper digestive tract.
“Both males and females can feed the chick this way, and even flamingos that are not the parents can act as foster-feeders,” the zoo said.
Both the fathers and their chick are lesser flamingos, a species native to sub-Saharan Africa and western India. The birds stand up to three feet tall and weigh between three and six pounds. Photosynthetic pigments in their algae-rich diet give the graceful fowl their distinctive pink plumage.
Flamingos typically live into their 30s in the wild and can reach their 70s in captivity.
Earlier this year, the social media celebrity flamingo couple, Curtis and Arthur, surprised zookeepers in England when they adopted an abandoned egg and hatched it, unprompted by their caretakers.
“We aren’t entirely sure how this has come about,’ said Pete Smallbones, the zoo’s bird curator, “although it is a known phenomenon in Chilean flamingos, as well as other bird flocks. The most likely scenario is that the egg was abandoned by another couple, so this pair have adopted it.”
Flamingos around the world face several threats in the wild, including egg harvesting, tourism disturbance, and habitat degradation due to industrial mining operations.
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